Public Intellectual Eric Weinstein (originator of the “Intellectual Dark Web” moniker) recently appeared on Chris Williamson’s podcast, titled “Compete Systemic Collapse” It’s a three-and-a-half hour podcast, but the first twelve minutes are truly exceptional. I’ve transcribed it:
Eric Weinstein: “I don’t know whether Donald Trump will be allowed to become President. I think that there’s a remarkable story and we’re in a funny game, which is “Are we allowed to say what that story is?” Because to say it, to analyze it, to name it is to bring it, uh, into view. I think we don’t understand why the censorship is behaving the way it is. We don’t understand why it’s in the shadows. We don’t understand why our news is acting in a bizarre fashion. Let’s just set the stage. Given that that was in February, um, there is something that I think Mike Benz has referred to as “The rules-based international order.” It’s an interlocking series of agreements, tacit understandings, explicit understandings, clandestine understandings, about how the most important structures keep the world free of war and keep markets open.
“And there has been a system in place, whether understood explicitly or behind the scenes, or implicitly that says the purpose of the two American parties is to prune the field of populist candidate so that whenever two candidates exist in a faceoff, both are acceptable to the world order. So what you’re trying to do from the point of view, let’s take it from the point of view of the State Department, the Intelligence community, the Defense Department and major corporations that have to do with international issues from arms trade to, oh I don’t know, food, they have a series of agreements that are fragile and could be overturned if a President entered the Oval Office that didn’t agree with them and the mood of the country was “Why do we pay taxes into these structures, why are we hamstrung, why aren’t we a free people?”
“So what the two parties would do is, they would run Primaries. You’d have populist candidates, and you’d pre-commit the populist candidates to support the candidates that won the Primaries. As long as that took place, and you had two candidates that were both acceptable to the international order, that is they’re not going to re-order NAFTA or NATO or what have you, we called that “Democracy.” So Democracy was the illusion of choice, what’s called “Magician’s choice,” where the choice is not actually – you know, “Pick a card, any card” but somehow the magician makes sure that the card you pick is the one that he knows.
“In that situation you have Magician’s Choice in the primaries, and then you’d have the duopoly field two candidates either of which was acceptable, and you could actually accept to afford to hold an election. And the populace would vote and that way the international order wasn’t put at risk every four years because you can’t have alliances that are subject to the whim of, uhm, the people in plebiscites.
“So, under that structure everything was going fine ’til 2016, and then the first candidate ever to not hold, um, any position in the military, nor position in government in the history of the Republic to enter the Oval Office, Donald Trump, broke through the Primary structure. So then there was a full-court press, “OK, we only have one candidate that’s acceptable to the International Order. Donald Trump will be under, um, constant pressure that he’s a loser, he’s a wild man, he’s an idiot, and he’s under the control of the Russians.” And then he was going to be, you know, a 20:1 underdog.
“And then he wins.
“And there was no precedent for this.
“They learned their lesson. You cannot afford to have candidates who are not acceptable to the international order and continue to have these alliances. This is an unsolved problem. So I don’t have a particular dog in this fight. I want to believe in Democracy, I also believe in international agreements, and it is the job of the State Department, the Intelligence community and the Defense Department to bring this problem in front of the American people, and say “You don’t know everything that’s going on, and if you start voting in populist candidates you’re going to end up knocking-out load-bearing walls that you don’t understand.”
Chris Williamson: “But Trump was in office four years. Did he turn the entire table upside down?”
Weinstein: “He risked doing that.”
Chris: “Say more.”
Weinstein: “You remember there was this uncomfortable accommodation given to the Central Intelligence Agency at the beginning of his actual term, there was a question about, um, was he going to question the – I’ve a very different point of view from most of my friends who were also at least nominally Democrats, which is it was a very immoral thing that was done to him. He was asked the question, “Will you pre-commit that you will accept the result of an election?”
“Now if you’re going to rig an election, you would ask somebody that to begin with, and that’s part of the game, and he says, “Well, you know, we’ll see.” So, you have this very strange going on where Democracy is the greatest threat to Democracy. How can that be? It’s two different concepts of Democracy. One concept of Democracy is the Will of the People. You hold plebiscites, and even if you do it with an Electoral College, the political parties, the idea is that the people are elec…, by and of and for the people. The other idea of Democracy is that Democracy is about institutions that sprang from Democracy once upon a time, and that those institutions have to be kept strong. Those are two completely different concepts that are overloaded to the same word.
“Under that circumstance we have a paradox which is “How do we keep the electorate from overturning the – you know – the Type A Democracy from overturning the Type B Democracy. And that is the unsolved problem that they will not bring in front of the People. So what you have is the situation in which I believe there are many people in Washington, D.C. who think that Donald Trump cannot become President because he can now go for broke. He also is not going to run for re-election. He’s relatively unconstrained. He’s wealthy, he’s, uh, learned how to play a lot of these games.
Chris: “He’s also got a bit of an axe to grind after the last six years.”
Weinstein: “No kidding. And he’s a wild card. You know, there’s three people who are doing amazing versions of the drunken boxing game. Kanye, who’s probably the first one to really fail, Elon and Donald Trump. And all three of them tried to do something. We couldn’t pin them down, you couldn’t figure out what they were going to do next. And that’s what the Orders keep trying to do. “Will you commit to this, will you say this, will you mouth these words?” And none of these people would play the game.
I find this all – you ever see Emmanuel Agustus, this boxer who actually, you know, I think Floyd M – anyway he said this was his toughest opponent because he just, he wouldn’t fight in a style that anyone could recognize.
Chris: “Unpredictable.”
Weinstein: “And the most entertaining boxer I’ve ever seen in my life. I mean just check out any highlight reel and you won’t even believe this is real. It doesn’t seem possible. So that’s what Donald Trump is. He’s a guy who’s got formulas that confuse people like Sam Harris. And Sam and I have been debating this for years. I think that Trump is an incredibly intelligent man, and that there’s incredible method in his Tweets, uh, of old. You can put them into a dataset, and you say that there’s five or six different types of Tweets and that the Left falls for every one of them, every time.
“So in this situation, you have a question: How is it that Donald Trump and RFK Jr. cannot possibly reach the Oval Office and we have to have a candidate who is pre-subscribed to perpetuating these institutions, these agreements and these orders?
“And there’s only one out of three who has that character, and that person has not won a Primary. Right now we have no idea who’s running the United States of America. I just came here in a Tesla, and I did not steer once. And I would say America is in full self-driving mode, and we don’t know what the AI is that’s running the Oval Office, and that’s really bizarre given that we have something like six minutes to make a decision about nuclear launches. Uh, we have no idea what the United States government in the Executive Branch actually is. But it can’t be Joe Biden.”
Chris: “Every time it seems that an election has happened over the last decade or so, it’s always been “This one is different, this is the most important, this is the most important.” Is there something different about the one we’re about to go into? How should we think about this election?”
Weinstein: “As World War II unraveled, the order that has has produced the illusion of peace for this length of time, imagine that you were let’s say in the 2000s, that you had this thing called The Great Moderation, there was this story that we had finally banned volatility from the markets. None of that was true. What you’re doing was you were going farther and farther into a regime without understanding that sooner or later the Jenga tower has to collapse. The order that was put in place at the end of World War II, none of its architects are still alive. Very few pieces of information were passed down about what it actually is, or how it functions, because it’s secret. And I think what you can say is that, um, we’re now living on the fumes built from that victory. Uh, that is what is unravelling. You’re about to head towards a multi-polar world where the Game Theory in the dyadic game of two players doesn’t look remotely like the Game Theory in a five or ten player game.
“So Kamala is essentially the youngest boomer possible, and she’s tied to the last Silent Generation President we’ll ever have, which is bizarre to begin with. And she’s pre-committed to try to continue that order in the guise of an alternatively woke Wall Street-friendly, Indian, Black, folksy, I don’t even know what she is. To quote the great Chris Swanson, “She’s a meme of a meme of a meme.” That was from our last talk, and I would say this is probably the most insane election we’ve ever seen by a comfortable margin. I would say that there’s no one in second place. Uh, I can’t think of another election that is even close to this bizarre. Including the attempted assassination on Donald Trump.”
I have enough interest to place another shirt order. Now that I know what it costs to mail them out, here’s the pricing:
Size S-XL: $30 including shipping
Size 2XL-4XL or XLT: $33.50 including shipping
Women’s sizes are available. I’m quite pleased by the quality of the shirts and the printing.
Please let me know as soon as possible. I plan to place the order next Friday, Sept. 13 It takes about 2 weeks for them to get to me, and another week or two to get to you. Payment through PayPal or Zelle.
Progressivism is founded on a delusion. The idea that if only the Best and the Brightest had sufficient power, they could structure society so as to create the Greatest Good for the Greatest Number. This is false.
Not only can they not, no one can. The complexity of even the simplest human society far exceeds the ability of any one, any group, or any computer process to understand and predict. – Jeff Dege at Quora, channeling Thomas Sowell.
A government by “the best and brightest” is, according to Britannica.com, an Oligarchy:
Oligarchy, government by the few, especially despotic power exercised by a small and privileged group for corrupt or selfish purposes. Oligarchies in which members of the ruling group are wealthy or exercise their power through their wealth are known as plutocracies. Aristotle used the term.
I started this blog in May of 2003 because I was pissed off. I’d met my wife-to-be in 1993, married her in 1995, and she was the first person I had met who only knew of firearms what she saw and read in the media. I’m a Southern boy, born and raised in the Gun Culture. Of course in 1994 Congress passed and the President signed the Assault Weapons Ban (that wasn’t), and that really concerned me. I wanted to understand the portion of the population that feared and hated armed citizens, so I decided to learn about these people and how they got that way.
To begin with, I spent a lot of time online at various forums, including a fairly long stint in the Gun Discussion at DemocraticUnderground (no link, on purpose), on gun and gun-control related boards, on Usenet, etc. I wrote essays at the long lost Themestream, and traded comments at various blogs. But in 2003 when the news media started hyping the sunsetting of the “assault weapon ban” and lying through their teeth while doing so, I got mad. Blogspot was free, so I set up the first iteration of The Smallest Minority. Letters-to-the-Editor weren’t going to cut it. I wanted a place to vent.
TSM started off with the intent of discussing the individual rights of human beings, with special emphasis on our Constitutionally protected rights, and especially the right to arms. I believe that knowledge is power. However, during my research – and it was research, in addition to all the time I have spent on the internet I have quite the bibliography to back it up – I came to understand that all of our rights are under siege. And the reason this siege is succeeding is because too much of the American population doesn’t understand the concept of individual rights, nor the purpose of our form of government. (Ah, naïveté. That was back when I believed “our form of government” was still the current operating model.) I was an autodidact, educating myself on a topic I believed important.
First, I wondered how all this had happened, then I wondered why it happened. Because it was blindingly obvious it had happened and it was still happening. So I read more – Blog posts, news stories, op-ed pieces, academic papers, and many of the books referenced in all these items. Then I put together stuff from all these sources and sat down and started composing Überposts as a way to get my head wrapped around it all. This is another one of those.
It became rapidly apparent that the primary vector was our education system that doesn’t educate. Or more accurately, mis-educates. (Mal-educates?) The deeper I dug into Public Education, the uglier it got. It peaked, I think, last year when I learned that the Department Education released a study indicating 54% of the adult American population cannot read at or above a sixth-grade level. John Taylor Gatto in his bombshell book The Underground History of American Education (2000) detailed the decline in American literacy, tracing it back to the 1930’s. From a 98% literacy rate for military draftees in WWI, literacy has continuously and precipitously declined. 96% in WWII. 81% for Korean War draftees. 73% in Vietnam. We were becoming dumber. And it was deliberate. We obviously knew how to teach reading, we knew what we were doing wasn’t working, yet we didn’t change our methods. That’s not an accident. The podcast Sold a Story is a 10-part series that goes into some detail about this, but it essentially boils down to the fact that our Schools of Education taught new teachers methods that didn’t work, spread those bad ideas to established teachers, and Teacher’s Unions cancelled anyone that publicly went against their worthless methods.
And obviously it’s not just reading. As the saying goes, “Reading is FUNdamental” to all other subjects. The morning of the day I started writing this, Instapundit linked to this report: Today’s Students Are Dangerously Ignorant of Our Nation’s History. And Our Failing Education System Is to Blame. You bet it is. Glenn Reynolds commented, “This is not the result of inept teaching. It’s the result of a deliberate strategy.” Damned skippy. Spend a few hours over at Quora and witness the complete cluelessness of Americans with respect to their government. And, by default, most of these people aren’t in the “read at or below a sixth-grade level.” They can string together a comprehensible (if inane or possibly insane) question or comment.
Math education suffers, too. Salman Khan opened his Khan Academy after the math tutorial videos he did for his young nieces took off on YouTube. Most of his subscribers were adults. Khan has said our system of math education is fundamentally flawed as well. That, too is not an accident. Victor Davis Hanson reported in 2019 that “60% of the students who enter the (California State University) system cannot take a college class because they don’t qualify to be there in the first place,” having to take “Bonehead English” and “Bonehead Math” – non-credit classes – before they can start a college education. This 2019 report, Skills and the Earnings of College Graduates reveals that:
One of every five bachelor’s degree holders among employed college graduates ages 21 to 65 lacks some important skills in literacy. For numeracy, the number is one in three.
Employed. College. GRADUATES.
And you wonder why doors fall off airliners and bridges collapse? Why citizens don’t understand Separation of Powers, or Supreme Court decisions?
So that’s the “what” and the “how.” Now we ask “WHY?!?“
British education researcher Sugata Mitra studied the UK’s education system. Britain had compulsory schooling long before the U.S. did, and he wanted to understand its origins. During his award-winning TED Talk he explained:
I tried to look at where did the the kind of learning we do in schools, where did it come from? And you know you can look far back into the past, but if you look at present-day schooling the way it is, it’s quite easy to figure out where it came from. It came from about 300 years ago, and it came from the last and the biggest empire on the planet. Imagine trying to run the entire planet without computers, without telephones, with data handwritten on slips of paper and traveling by ships. But the Victorians actually did it. What they did was amazing. They created a global computer made up of people. It’s still with us today, it’s called the “bureaucratic administrative machine.”
In order to have that machine running, you need lots and lots of people. They made another machine to produce those people – the school. The schools would produce the people who would then become parts of the bureaucratic administrative machine. They must be identical to each other. They must know three things: they must have good handwriting because the data is handwritten, they must be able to read, and they must be able to do multiplication, division, addition and subtraction in their head. They must be so identical that you could pick one up from New Zealand and ship them to Canada and he would be instantly functional.
The Victorians were great engineers. They engineered a system that was so robust that it is still with us today, continuously producing identical people for a machine that no longer exists.
“The schools would produce the people who would then become parts of the bureaucratic administrative machine. They must be identical to each other.” They needed to be cogs in that machine. And when we established our schools at the turn of the 20th Century, we set them up to accomplish the same task. Not philosophers or artists or engineers, lawyers, doctors, or politicians. Just obedient little cogs that went where they were told and did what they were told.
Yet during Victoria’s reign (1837-1901), the United States became a world economic power, without such an education system. How did that happen without formal state-mandated education? Well, the fact that our “empire” consisted of the contiguous chunk of North America between Canada and Mexico and wasn’t scattered around the world helped, but the fact of the matter is this:
Before compulsory state education, people generally educated themselves. Either through home schooling, one-room schoolhouses, self-study or as apprentices, those who wanted an education got one. That education didn’t come, usually, with a certificate to hang on your wall, but it was practical and useful.
• George Washington (1732-1799) learned surveying.
• Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) apprenticed to become a lawyer.
• John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937) went to high school and later attended a commercial college in Cleveland to learn bookkeeping, but I don’t know if he graduated. What he was self-taught at, however, was business and finance, and it paid off well. At one point he was the richest man in the world.
• Thomas Edison (1837-1931) received very little formal schooling yet became the greatest inventor of his time, or at least the most well known.
• Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) had primary and secondary education, but dropped out of college because of conflict with his professors. Self-taught in Engineering and Physics, he is responsible for the alternating-current power that runs the world today.
• Tesla’s ideas made George Westinghouse (1846–1914) who attended college for three months before dropping out, a major fortune because George understood how to commercialize Tesla’s genius.
• Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) was essentially home-schooled when he wasn’t performing child labor, then built a steel empire without a college education.
This system (or lack thereof) worked, as shown by the fact that 98% of draftees for WWI (1914-1918) were literate. Or read some of the letters that soldiers on both sides of the Civil War wrote home.
Dr. Mitra’s fame comes from showing what we already knew, that children, when given the opportunity, properly guided and motivated can and will teach themselves. Their outcomes will not be equal, but they will learn, and even the slow learners often have better outcomes than the median product of our current systems based on the Prussian model. (Read that.) The fast learners will far exceed anything our systems produce. Salman Khan has demonstrated the same thing. Let the kids proceed at their own pace, and some of them will amaze you. You just need to challenge and encourage, and allow them, working in small groups, to help each other. Instead, our system does what Noam Chomsky said:
America was as inventive and productive as it was because of those exceptional independent thinkers. Those who could, DID, unfettered and free, in ways no other country would allow. They weren’t cogs in a machine, they broke the machines and made better ones. Many failed. Then they picked themselves up and tried again. Orville and Wilbur Wright with no formal college education taught themselves aeronautical engineering, built their own wind tunnel and designed the most efficient wing of its time. Then they used what they’d learned and built the first successful heavier-than-air powered aircraft – a feat the New York Times had authoritatively stated would take “one million to ten million years” to do, just before they did it.
Sixty-five years later, humans landed on the moon. Fifty-two years after Apollo 17, we haven’t been back.
Yes, the British Empire and the industrialists of the United States wanted and needed cogs with certain skills and attributes, but we also need artists, musicians, lawyers, doctors, engineers and statesmen. Those, the creators of our schools intended, wouldn’t come from public education. The children of the wealthy didn’t attend public schools, but rather private ones. Those private schools did teach music, art, languages, rhetoric, poetry, logic, etc. You see, the children coming out of these schools would be the leaders of the future – leaders of industry, members of governments, lawyers, doctors, scientists etc. They would be the intellectual class. England had a class system. The U.S. didn’t. (See my favorite joke on that topic.) But as Jordan Peterson likes to say, hierarchy is as natural to humans as it is to lobsters. We made our own. And we used Public Education to help, because, well:
As Aristotle once said, “All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.” Indeed it does. It’s the primary vector of control.
Rockefeller was an early and enthusiastic supporter of mandatory public education. Frederick Taylor Gates was one of his men, and served as the President of the General Education Board created by Rockefeller’s altruism. Yeah, altruism. That was it.
The Robber Barons weren’t interested in anything but competent little cogs to work in their factories, buy their products, and do what they were told by their betters. As in the British Empire, our public schools would provide them.
Education – the combination of knowledge, reason, and understanding – gives individuals power. By 2004 I hadn’t quite reached this understanding regarding the difference between education and schooling. Throughout history, the most common form of government has been the Oligarchy, whether that be Royal families, banking tycoons like the Medici, or the Hunnish Empire under Attila. I wrote about this in a roundabout way in Those Without Swords Can Still Die Upon Them, explaining how the technology of modern firearms was responsible for the rise of modern democratic governments over oligarchies. In that piece I concluded:
So what do you do if you want to fetter a free people?
1) Remove their ability to reason.
2) Constrain their ability to access and exchange information.
3) Relieve them of the means with which to defend themselves and their property.
Which of these seems easiest, and how would it be best accomplished? And best resisted?
Of course at that time I thought it was #3. Silly me. If you make them illiterate, you’ve severely limited #2, and made long strides towards #1. Obviously, those are easier.
Human nature says most people who already have power don’t want to see theirs diminished. For them, power is always a zero-sum game. The ones who have grasped power don’t want to share, and they don’t like upcoming competition. What better way to limit competition than by metaphorically smothering it in the cradle? And how better to maintain control of the masses than by controlling their ability to think?
With the British system you get an elite, highly educated class, and a lower-tier class that’s still literate and numerate, but their knowledge is strictly limited, and they are trained to be obedient and to not question authority.
John Ringo in one of his novels wrote what I call “Truth in Fiction,” where he uses a dramatic passage to explain a human truth. From his Road to Damascus (2005):
(The party) is composed of two tiers. The lower tier produces many outspoken members who make their demands known to the upper tier. The lower tier is derived from the inner-city population that serves as the base of the party. The lower tier’s members are generally educated in public school systems and if they aspire to advanced training, they are educated in facilities provided by the state. This wing constitutes the majority of (the party’s) membership, but contributes little or nothing to party theory or platform. It votes the party line and is rewarded with cash payments, subsidized housing, subsidized education, and occasional preferential employment in government positions. The lower tier provides only a handful of clearly token individuals allowed to serve in high offices.
The upper tier, which includes most of the party’s management, virtually all the appointed and elected government officials, and all of the party’s decision-makers, is drawn exclusively from suburban areas where wealth is a fundamental criterion for admittance as a resident. These party members are generally educated at private schools and attend private colleges. They are not affected by food-rationing schemes, income caps or taxation laws, as the legislation drafted and passed by members of their social group inevitably contains loopholes that effectively shelter their income and render them immune from unpleasant statues that restrict the lives of lower-tier party members and all nonparty citizens.
(The party) leadership recognizes that in return for supporting a seemingly populist agenda, they can obtain all the votes they require to remain in power. Even the most cursory analysis of their actions and attitudes, however, indicates that they are not populists but, in fact, are strong antipopulists who actively despise their voting base. This….is proven by their efforts to reduce public educational systems to a level most grade-school children (in other countries) have surpassed, with the excuse that this curriculum is all that the students can handle. They have made the inner-city population base totally dependent on the government, which they control.
So a system established to produce identical cogs that could read, write, and do arithmetic in their heads now fails at all three. It’s systemic. It’s deliberate. The question again is WHY? Because the cogs they needed didn’t need those skills. Our Empire was the Continental U.S. We had rail & telegraph. The number of people needed to manage a business (or a government) was reduced, but people able and willing to stand at an assembly line and do repetitive tasks? Why would they need to read, write and do mathematics? They just needed to be compliant and trainable. Children did it before compulsory schooling. The article referenced above regarding the Prussian system references a UC San Diego study. Its author, Augustina S. Paglayan says:
My research reveals violence can heighten national elites’ anxiety about the masses’ moral character and the state’s ability to maintain social order. In this context, public education systems were created and expanded to teach obedience. (My emphasis.)
They understood what Mencken and Douglass understood. But there was a further wrench introduced into the system.
The British school system dates back, as Dr. Mitra says, about 300 years, to about the time they first started their empire. By Victoria’s time it was a finely-tuned machine. We started about 1900. Things here were in full swing by 1920 or so. This time frame corresponds with a new popular philosophy taking the world by storm – Progressivism. Progressivism is the philosophy Jeff Dege comments about at the top of this exceedingly long essay.
(Progressivism’s) goals involved strengthening the national government and addressing people’s economic, social, and political demands. Progressives saw elements of American society that they wished to reform, especially ending the extreme concentration of wealth among the elite and the enormous economic and political power of big business.
The leaders of the Progressive Era worked on a range of overlapping issues that characterized the time, including labor rights, women’s suffrage, economic reform, environmental protections, and the welfare of the poor, including poor immigrants.
It was a well-intentioned and necessary movement, but as Reason Magazine likes to point out “What a Wonderful Idea! With the Best of Intentions! What Could Possibly Go Wrong?” Among other things, the Progressives were enthusiastic about the promise of eugenics, and Woodrow Wilson thought that the Constitution was outdated and limited how much and how fast he could change things. He was right, but he wanted to discard it, not amend it. He thought the President should be part of an oligarchy of the elite.
But what if democracy is merely the political superstructure of a particular cultural stage — simple mass literacy? In that case, continuing advances in teaching and learning at the secondary and postsecondary levels will necessarily upset democracy in the places where it first appeared.
Secondary education and especially higher education reintroduce the notion of inequality into the mental and ideological organization of developed societies. After a brief period of hesitation and scruples, the more highly educated wind up believing that they are truly superior. In developed countries a new class is emerging that comprises roughly 20 percent of the population in terms of sheer numbers but controls about half of each nation’s wealth. This new class has more and more trouble putting up with the constraint of universal suffrage
Advances in literacy made us live for a time in the world of De Tocqueville for whom the march of democracy was “providentielle” — almost an effect of divine will. The rise of higher education today is leading us toward the calamity of another kind of “providence”: oligarchy. It is a surprising return to Aristotle in which oligarchy may succeed democracy. (pg. 17)
So education, especially secondary and post-secondary education among the wealthy class, made them recognize the inequality that existed, and the Gilded Age (1870-1890) and the years leading up to it were a time of great inequality. Karl Marx, who graduated from the University of Jena in 1841 with a Ph.D in philosophy was one such member of that wealthy class. He and Frederik Engels published The Communist Manifesto in 1848. It was, to say the least, a very influential work for the Progressives.
The Amendment process for our Constitution is rigorous, yet in the short period between 1913 and 1920 four Amendments were added to the Constitution on the strength of the Progressive movement. Try that today.
So many of the wealthy and well-educated were shocked and guilt-ridden at the inequality around them. They felt themselves superior to those outside their class, but wanted to ameliorate the situation. They wanted to help “The People.” But they didn’t want them to rebel against the system that made them rich. How to do that?
EDUCATION!!
Many people who went into teaching, and especially training teachers, weren’t as interested in Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic as they were with Changing the World™! They were what were referred to as “Agents of Change.” They wanted to make more Progressives. World War I following on the heels of the Gilded age and the Great Depression following the war just proved to them that they were right to do so. Now the cogs they produced would spread Progressivism! And some did, more with each passing generation.
Why does the education establishment hate Home Schooling and Charter Schools? Because these remove children from indoctrination into Progressive ideology. They produce those independent thinkers Mencken and Douglass and Robespierre explained oppose tyranny. Those people threaten Good Order, the status quo. They don’t know their place. You get them from the public school systems, too, but they’re a tiny minority who escape it mostly unscathed.
In 2010 Professor Angelo Codevilla, at the time American professor of International Relations at Boston University (PBUH) wrote a piece for the American Spectator, America’s Ruling Class – And the Perils of Revolution. It caused quite a stir. Rush Limbaugh read it in whole on his radio show. In that piece he discussed the difference between the Upper Tier and a third tier, what Ringo calls the “non-party members.” He called the Upper Tier the Ruling Class and the other the Country Class. The Country Class didn’t live in the cities, weren’t dependent on government for “cash payments, subsidized housing, subsidized education, and occasional preferential employment in government positions.” No, the Country Class pays for all that. The Country Class sends its children to state schools, too, though their educations are often better, for certain values of “better,” than the Lower Tier gets. The Country Class provides the tax dollars and their sons and daughters to man the military. The Country Class builds and maintains the infrastructure, grows and distributes food, produces and distributes power, makes the products, moves them, sells them, buys them, and buries them in landfills when they’re done.
The Country Class is the cogs in the machine.
The Ruling Class is managed by what I’ll call the Gentry Class – the Oligarchs. These people do influence party theory and platform, because they’re significant political donors, or high-ranking members of government, and especially, high ranking members and former members of the government’s intelligence apparatus. They control the corporations that control the media, real estate, basically every facet of life. They’re very different from the Country Class. Rasmussen reports that a recent study under the title “Them vs. U.S.” polled 1,000 of the “1%.” These are people you won’t see at a Trump rally. “The 1%” are defined by specific criteria:
• At least one postgraduate degree • $150,000-plus annual income • High-density urban residence • Attended an Ivy League school
What the survey found isn’t shocking if you’ve been paying attention, but if you haven’t, read on:
Financial Well-being: Nearly three-quarters of the elites surveyed believe they are better off now financially than they were when Joe Biden entered the White House. Less than 20% of ordinary Americans feel the same way.
Individual Freedom: Elites are three times more likely than all Americans to say there is too much individual freedom in the country. Astonishingly, almost half of the elites and almost 6 of 10 ivy leaguers say there is too much freedom.
Climate Change: An astonishing 72% of the elites — including 81% of the elites who graduated from the top universities — favor banning gas cars. And majorities of elites would ban gas stoves, nonessential air travel, SUVs and private air conditioning. That means no air travel with the kids to Disney World.
Education: Most elites think that teachers unions and school administrators should control the agenda of schools. Most mainstream Americans think that parents should make these decisions.
“Too much freedom.” Americans believing there’s “too much freedom.”
“OK, so what?” you ask.
The attitudes of these people are the attitudes of your Oligarchs. The Oligarchs are a tiny subset of this group. These highly educated and very wealthy people believe themselves superior by dint of their wealth, education and power. Daniel Greenfield noted a long time ago:
The cult of the left believes that it is engaged in a great apocalyptic battle with corporations and industrialists for the ownership of the unthinking masses. Its acolytes see themselves as the individuals who have been “liberated” to think for themselves. They make choices. You however are just a member of the unthinking masses. You are not really a person, but only respond to the agendas of your corporate overlords. If you eat too much, it’s because corporations make you eat. If you kill, it’s because corporations encourage you to buy guns. You are not an individual. You are a social problem.
The Oligarchs have convinced themselves that their benevolent rule is “For the People.” We don’t know what’s best, they do. Here’s another “Truth in Fiction,” Sir Terry Pratchett from his Discworld novel Night Watch:
Vimes had spent his life on the streets and had met decent men, and fools, and people who’d steal a penny from a blind beggar, and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he’d never met The People.
People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so, the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.
As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up.
Thomas Sowell calls these people The Anointed. The “Self-” is implied. They want what’s best for “The People,” but as John Ringo points out, “Even the most cursory analysis of their actions and attitudes, however, indicates that they are not populists but, in fact, are strong antipopulists who actively despise their voting base.” And his evidence of that is that they, willingly and deliberately, destroy the educational system of the “lower tier.”
Why the mass illegal immigration? The excuse is that they’re coming here for a better life, but the actual reason is because universal suffrage when the Country Class has a say puts a crimp in the power of the Oligarchs. They need those dependent voters to maintain the illusion of Democratic choice. A population that won’t do as it’s told scares the shit out of them. Do you understand now their visceral reaction to January 6? The People actually ROSE UP AGAINST THEM. How DARE THEY?
They’ve used defamation (Racist, Nazi, homophobe, transphobe, etc. etc. ad infinitum). That didn’t work. They’ve tried lawfare, putting hundreds in jail trying to frighten the rest of us. That didn’t work.
I’ve said that I believe that knowledge is power, but in another bit of “Truth in Fiction,” this scene from Game of Thrones puts the situation plainly:
As all those memes go, Epstein didn’t kill himself, and no one has paid any price for his death. There have been many, many suspicious deaths of people who threatened the rich and powerful, deaths signed off as suicides or accidents. I have no doubt these people, being superior and all, have no qualms about killing to keep their power. Eggs, omelets, etc. They own the Department of Justice, whose leadership largely comes from those rich and powerful families, and they own our National Intelligence agencies whose leadership largely comes from those rich and powerful families. They own the media, whose leadership…. You get the rest. Knowledge is power, especially when it’s backed with deniable lethality.
In 1826 Thomas Jefferson was invited to attend a 50th Anniversary celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. He was too ill to travel, but wrote a gracious letter declining the invitation. Do read the whole thing, but in that letter was this passage:
…the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately….
We need to remind the Ruling Class™ of this fact. Emphatically. Because they very much want to be back in the saddle again.
This isn’t hyperbole. Just as they believed Joe Biden was physically and mentally at the top of his game, they believe this rhetoric literally. And now that they’ve realized that Joe cannot win, that neither the attacks on Trump’s character nor the attempts to put him in jail have slowed him down, there’s only one, obvious path. They’ve got to kill Hitler.
Honestly, I’m surprised it took this long. I guess the debate and the “Big-boy” press conference finally flipped a switch.
I don’t think this will be the last attempt.
November’s going to be interesting. Invest in fire extinguishers.
I had to finally retire my “Faith in Government” shirt and I can’t find a new one online, so I designed my own. I’ve used CustomInk before with good results. Here’s the new design:
If I can get orders for at least nine, they’d be $22/shirt plus shipping. Over at Facebook I have commitments for five. Sizes up to 4XL with Tall available. 2XL and larger are an additional $2.50.
I haven’t seen anyone comment on this. Thursday night right after the “debate,” the televised mental institution that is MSNBC had a panel discussion about it. Joy Reid, perhaps one of the most Leftist of all of media said this:
President Biden had one job tonight. And it was… one primary job, and yes it was to litigate Donald Trump’s criminality and all of those things, but he had to settle his own party. He needed to settle Democrats. Democrats you know, they aways talk about “Democrats are bedwetters, and Democrats are always panicking.” YES, Democrats are always panicking, they’re always scared. They’re always thinking they’re going to lose. Democrats are always pessimistic, they’re neurotic.
Neurotic – a tendency toward anxiety, depression, self-doubt, and other negative feelings. Always scared, always panicking. Bedwetters. Who believe only they should run the country.
Had someone on the Right said this, they would have been shouted down by all “left-thinking” people as being,
A) Wrong B) Insensitive to the mentally ill C) Beyond the pale D) Insert yours here.
But Joy Reid said this on television, as a member of a five-person panel that included Rachel Maddow, and no one called her on it. No one so much as suggested she was wrong. It was accepted common knowledge.
Now you understand the constant accusations of Republicans being Nazis, of wanting to “destroy our Democracy,” of wanting to become dictators, of wanting to enslave women and re-enslave blacks, etc, etc, etc.
They’re NUTS. And they know they’re nuts. They drove themselves there. ETA: In addition to being neurotic, they’re the most paranoid population on the planet. (End edit.) They say they are the “Reality-based” party. They wouldn’t know reality if it bit them on the ass. After all, it did Thursday night, and lots and lots of them are now saying it never happened, or if it did, it wasn’t important.
